Peter RV.  Sign up and your comments are immediately posted.  Fail to sign up and they often get lost.

If only military and civilian personnel would use this vast and often effective psychological operations / persuasion operations capability for good purposes, we might really be able to move forward.

When the PSYOP people in our military community, intel services and civilian world fully realize the corruption of the Bush-Cheney gang, maybe we will see movement in this direction.

Education, communication and information about important, truthful and constructive developments are crucial.

Food for thought on this at:

“Modern consciousness research, World War II lessons combine to win hearts and minds, war and peace”

American Chronicle

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=14783

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“‘Outside the box’ intelligence is needed for U.S. and human race”

American Chronicle

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=3324

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“Many forms of conventional, unconventional intelligence can help our global efforts”

American Chronicle

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=3562

As revealed by the Danny Schechter documentary, “Weapons of Mass Deception,” the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories are not isolated incidents.  A study performed by Col. Sam Gardiner (USAF ret.), who taught strategy at the Naval and Air War Colleges reveals “how information dominance promotes strategic influence, how it drove the Bush administration’s pre-emptive war using deceptive information as an integral component of military and political combat.”  As Schechter notes, “This goes beyond just influencing what we think, it aims at controlling what we think about.”

A symbiotic relationship between the conglomerated corporate media and the administration facilitated the propaganda.  White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card likened it to a product roll-out.  A “master narrative” was used, defining Iraq as the problem and preemptive war as the only solution.  As observed by Paul Krugman, “If you ask why do the Europeans see things so differently, well, one answer is…they don’t have…‘Countdown Iraq,’ ‘SHOWDOWN IRAQ,’ ‘Target Iraq’ on their screens non-stop.”

Starting with embedding, the administration sought to dominate the information environment.  Schechter notes it was a mixture of Hollywood and Stalin.  The Pentagon retained Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of “Black Hawk Down” as its adviser.  It hired a Hollywood set designer to build its media center in Doha, Qatar.  The Doha operation was run by Jim Wilkinson, whom Harvey Rice of the Houston Chronicle describes as “a political commissar…straight out of Stalin.”  Wilkinson was the media specialist who was responsible for staging the angry protest that stopped the Miami-Dade recount, where Republican congressional staffers in white shirts and ties did their best to imitate a mob of Nazi brownshirts. Wilkinson’s role was to insure that Doha stayed “on-message.”

Col. Gardiner estimates there were 50-60 stories made up by the Pentagon from whole cloth.  One that stood out was the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos square.  As noted by Mark Crispin Miller in “Cruel & Unusual,” where the media portrayed this as a “spontaneous and jubilant uprising of thousands” of ordinary Iraqis, a Reuters “aerial photo made it clear that there were just a few hundred Iraqis clustered at the pedestal…, while, all around, the lone and level grounds stretched far away without a soul in sight…That seeming multitude…was in fact the entourage…of Ahmed Chalabi…The Marines had organized the whole revolutionary spectacle.  The perimeter was sealed off with razor wire.”

Their answers will be “documents are missing” as same as Alberto Gonzales’ “E-Mails vanished without a trace”.